True patriotism hates injustice
in its own land
more than anywhere else.
-Clarence Darrow
Hellraisers Journal, Thursday September 26, 1907
A Tribute to Clarence Darrow, Hero of Many Battles For Labor
From the Duluth Labor World of September 21, 1907:
CHARACTER SKETCH OF CLARENCE S. DARROW
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Great Lawyer Who Defended Haywood
Fought Many Battles For Labor.
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He has Ever Been On the Firing Line
In the Interest of Humanity.
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Twelve years ago, when Eugene V. Debs was imprisoned as a result of his activities in the great railway strike in Chicago, Clarence Darrow became his legal champion. Three years later he defended Thomas I. Kidd and two striking woodworkers who were charged with having “conspired,” through their union, “to injure the business” of a great lumber company in Oshkosh, Wis. His arguments, which has been printed in phamphlet form and is pronounced by no less a critic than William Dean Howells “as interesting as a novel” resulted in the acquittal of his clients.
A more distinctive figure than Darrow’s, says Kellogg Durland, in the Boston Transcript, has seldom come out of the west:
He was born in the Western Reserve of Ohio. His father was an honest man. After qualifying for the church he gave up the cloth for a country store that he might “feel surer of what he was doing.” At 19 young Darrow was teaching school. One year of college life satisfied him. Early in his twenties he drifted to Chicago and studied law. All his life he has been a dreamer and happy in his dreams. He has the strength of a man of vision. As a lawyer he has wide reputation, for he has been the corporation counsel for a great railroad and the defender of men like Eugene V. Debs and Kidd in the famous woodworkers’ conspiracy case. Public life has always called him, but he has mostly been deaf to the call. “I want to make my living as a lawyer and devote my leisure to writing stories and essays,” he has pleaded almost peevishly. “And I want to write a long novel.”
